27024: Hermantin(News)Fugitive from gang violence awaits uncertain exile abroad (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Posted on Sat, Dec. 24, 2005


HAITI
Fugitive from gang violence awaits uncertain exile abroad
Rampant violence and impunity in the slums of Haiti force some to seek refuge 
abroad, risking their lives on smugglers' ill-equipped boats.
By JOE MOZINGO
jmozingo@MiamiHerald.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE - The metal plate that holds her broken leg together is starting 
to cut into the flesh of her thigh. She winces when she struggles onto her 
crutches, but she has no money to pay a surgeon and little hope to earn any 
soon.

Bergel Mirléne is in hiding, rotating between the homes of friends and 
relatives. She says she is certain that the gang members who put a gun to her 
head and beat her unconscious with a metal pipe are still looking for her.

That day 15 months ago, she recalls, they had come for her husband, Theodore 
Fritz, a radio journalist who apparently offended them. He slipped out the back 
of their shack. Mirléne, six months pregnant, stayed and bore the brunt of 
their rage.

The blows killed her baby and she spent nearly four months in the hospital 
undergoing surgeries, she says. Fritz fled the neighborhood and hid out with 
friends around the city.

But soon, with no way to work on the run, he decided the only way to survive 
was to escape, joining the stream of Haitians who risk their lives and savings 
on leaky wooden boats headed to the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas and South 
Florida.

Many of them just lose their money to unscrupulous smugglers. Others are caught 
by the U.S. Coast Guard and returned. A very few get taken to Guantánamo Bay to 
apply for political refuge. Nobody knows how many make it undetected to their 
destination -- or drown or die of thirst at sea.

Left alone to deal with her injuries, Mirléne could do nothing but agonize and 
wait for word of Fritz's fate.

FRUITS OF POLITICS

Their tale of bloodshed, flight and separation is one heard over and over in 
the slums of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, where residents face violence 
largely set in motion by political leaders past and present.

When President JeanBertrand Aristide fled the country during an armed rebellion 
last year, the urban gangs that he had used to protect him were left without a 
patron. At first, the young men mostly fought the U.N. peacekeepers and the 
U.S.-backed transitional government that replaced Aristide. But they soon fell 
into infighting that left untold hundreds of people dead.

In Fritz's neighborhood, Grand Ravine, gangs that claim allegiance to Aristide 
are locked in battle with a group called Lame Ti Manchét -- the Army of Little 
Machetes -- allegedly backed by rogue elements of the Haitian police.

Just in August, black-masked police and Ti Manchét members attacked rivals in 
front of some 5,000 spectators during a daytime soccer match in Grand Ravine. 
About 11 people were hacked and shot to death.

It's that kind of feudal violence that Fritz, 30, set out to escape.

''It's easier to die in Port-au-Prince than to live,'' Fritz says in late 
August while waiting for a boat out of the country in the northern port of 
Cap-Haitien.

For three months he has been living in a reeking seaside slum, on a block where 
scowling young men smoke and sell marijuana all day. It is a place where 
sailors organize smuggling trips to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos 
Islands or the Bahamas farther north -- stepping stones on the route to South 
Florida.

Fritz says he never thought he would leave Haiti. He misses his wife and has a 
son by a prior marriage who needs him. He loved his freelance work for Radio 
Vision 2000, and was studying journalism at the university.

''I put my heart into it,'' he says. ``I didn't let anyone tell lies on my 
microphone.''

Like many reporters in Haiti, Fritz had informal employment. A staff journalist 
for the station regularly paid Fritz to go into slums to cover protests and 
shootings. His wife and his mother begged him to do something less dangerous, 
and with a regular salary. But Fritz is a strong-headed man, resolute in his 
opinions and aggressive in conversation. Their entreaties didn't stop him.

Miréne, now 28, says she knew they wouldn't. That passion and resolve were the 
traits that drew her to him, ever since he sidled up to her eight years before.

His opening line back then: ''I got this friend who really likes you.'' She 
laughed. The intensity in his eyes betrayed his intentions. They have been 
together ever since.

Fritz says he felt he was helping his country by getting the truth out on the 
radio. And to him, the truth was that the gangs weren't fighting to get 
Aristide back. They were fighting for their own power -- the power to steal, 
rape and murder with impunity.

According to Fritz, he went on the air one day and said that infamous gang 
leaders like Emmanuel ''Dread'' Wilmé were ''fake'' members of Aristide's 
Lavalas Family party trying to make the ''real Lavalas'' look bad.

Whether that was really Fritz's offense is not clear. His brother says he 
attended some anti-Aristide demonstrations.

Whatever the cause, several gunmen came to his shack one day in August 2004, he 
says. They had come once before when he was gone, and left without any 
violence.

This time they demanded to know where he was, and put a gun to Mirléne's head. 
She didn't know.

'They said, `You should know where he is, he's your man,' '' she recalls.

They pistol-whipped her and hit her across the back with a metal pipe, she 
says. When she fell to the ground, they kicked her until she passed out.

She woke up in the hospital. Fritz and her family pooled money to fix her 
shattered femur. A doctor put in a metal rod and a plate. He told her the baby 
was dead.

Fritz says he tried to get the radio station to help them, but managers turned 
him away. He wasn't their employee. He then tried to get asylum from the 
Chilean Embassy, after hearing a rumor Chile was liberal in granting refugee 
status. Again, he was turned away.

A MAN ON THE RUN

By summer of 2005, Fritz has reached Cap-Haitien. He hopes he can slip into 
Providenciales or, if caught by the U.S. Coast Guard, apply for political 
asylum. He carries a photo of his injured wife hooked up to an IV and a press 
pass from Radio Vision 2000 that a friend there made for him on the sly.

His chances of winning U.S. asylum are very slim. Washington almost without 
exception considers Haitians economic refugees. As of that day, not one Haitian 
caught at sea in 2005 had been granted refugee status.

The day he is expecting to leave, Fritz can barely speak, he is so terrified of 
the ocean. A hurricane is somewhere over the horizon. He regrets never learning 
to swim. 'When all my friends would go swimming and invite me in, I'd say, `I'm 
not a fish.' ''

He laughs and then comes close to tears. ''I'm worried I'll lose my life trying 
to find life,'' he says.

Fritz begs an American reporter to translate a note for him into English, so he 
can give it to the Coast Guard, saying he is a journalist who believes he is in 
danger in Haiti.

On the night of Aug. 30, Fritz boards a rickety 60-foot sloop in the middle of 
Cap Haitien's bay for the voyage to Providenciales.

The conditions on board are appalling -- 169 people packed together in dripping 
heat, according to passengers' later accounts of the trip.

For three days they sail. But the sailors appear lost, the passengers say. They 
quickly run out of food and water. Many of them resort to drinking saltwater.

When the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Sapelo spots them, they are only 27 miles off 
the coast of Haiti. Fritz presents his press pass, the note and the photo of 
his wife, and says he's being persecuted in Haiti.

The cutter returns everyone else to a dock in Port-au-Prince and transfers 
Fritz across the Windward Passage to the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, 
Cuba, to see an asylum officer.

He becomes the first Haitian migrant caught at sea in 2005 who was not 
immediately repatriated to Haiti.

In detention, he scores a second coup. The asylum officer determines that he 
does have a ''credible fear'' of persecution in Haiti. Fritz is granted refugee 
status and awaits settlement in a third country.

Speaking by telephone with The Miami Herald in November, Fritz says he has 
requested to go to Canada, where many Haitian emigrants live. He was told the 
United States was not an option. He says the conditions at the immigration 
facility are good, that he is well fed and is generally free to roam the base, 
even look for work. The State Department refuses to let a reporter visit him.

Fritz says he is worried about his wife and family. He has heard that his 
brother was shot in Grand Ravine. But even if it takes months to be relocated 
to a new country, he will wait it out.

''If I return to Haiti, I will die,'' he says.

WIFE HIDING OUT

One morning in early December, Mirléne is sleeping at Fritz's mother's home, up 
a narrow alley in a Port-au-Prince shantytown. Six people live here now, 
including Fritz's brother, who was indeed shot in the leg and has the scar to 
prove it.

Mirléne lies down most of the day and tries not to show her face outside much. 
She says she has been living with her sister but was kicked out earlier in the 
week, after gang members started poking around.

She tries not to worry that she may never see Fritz again. She says she has not 
received a phone call or heard any word from him. She is consumed with fear 
that he is dead.

A reporter tells her about his status in Guantánamo.

''I love him so much,'' she says. She uses the front of her dress to wipe her 
eyes. ``Everything is horrible. Everything is horrible. The only news I can 
have right now is Fritz coming back.''

It is more than a year after the attack and she can barely walk with crutches. 
Black bruises striate her back.

As her femur has slowly healed, she says it's pushing the metal plate out. The 
doctor told her she needs to have the rod and plate replaced. But she says it 
will cost at least $600, a sum she is not close to having.

For now, she feels she can sleep in the same place only a couple of nights, and 
then must move on. She says there is no one she can turn to for protection -- 
not the Haitian police, not the 8,000 U.N. peacekeepers here.

Mirléne wonders if Fritz could get her refugee status, too, and they could live 
together in Canada. It is a possibility.

''The hope of that,'' she says, ``will make me survive.''